Blog

July 2019

We’ve been hard at work refurbishing a new stock room for our Uniform Exchange. We’ve been lucky enough to have a huge amount of support from local organisations, who have sent volunteers to help us transform an unloved unit into a fully-functioning stock room.

This new stock room will make a big difference to the Exchange, as it gives us the space we need to hold and sort even more items for families, including much-needed PE kit.

At the beginning of July we had a team from HSBC, who put in a lot of elbow grease sanding and painting the walls. Then Luton Sixth Form College students came and sorted all of our PE kit, categorising it by school, so that we can begin to offer it to families in our Uniform Exchange.

A team from Randstad came and painted more walls and even the floor in the unit, and they began a full stock take of all of our uniform, moving it to the new stock room as they went. This was not an easy task as it involved a lot of dust, paint fumes and also stairs! They even made this brilliant video of their day with us:

Local firm Cawleys kindly donated a skip for 1 week to help us responsibly dispose of waste materials resulting from the refurb. Two volunteers from Vauxhall Motors spent two days constructing our hanging rails, so that we have lots of sturdy storage space for all of our stock. Local solicitors Machins came to finish the stock take and moved the rest of the stock into the new stock room, hanging it up on the new railings, and a team from The Mall took over where Machins left off. This is when it started to really feel like a stock room!

We’re incredibly grateful for the support from all of these organisations – we could not have done this without them. Thanks also goes to The Clothworkers’ Foundation and the National Lottery Community Fund for the grants that funded the work and enabled us to buy new equipment, including an all-important washing machine and tumble drier.